A Large Shadow in Winter
by RaeAnne
Summary: More than twenty years have passed, Sansa is not the girl she was so long ago when she exchanged her maiden cloak for a cloak of crimson. She longs to see the blooms, the blooms of roses that only bloom in the shadow of winter.


Sansa closed her eyes breathing in the crisp clean scent of the first winter roses. They were finally blooming, it taken the better part of the 25 years that had passed since Winterfell had burnt to return the soil to a healthful enough state to yield the famous bushes, bushes that would produce multiple, healthy, blooms. There was nothing like a Winter Rose of Winterfell, it had no rival.

This year the blooms almost reached the glory she remembered in her childhood, the childhood before the War, before that long winter that changed everything. Those years of her childhood seemed so far and distant, almost unreal. The sharp, perfumed scent of the roses reminded her though.

She was nearing her 35th name-day and she felt every single year on this day. _Beautiful, _she mused fingers brushing over the brilliant white petals. While her childhood before the War was hazy and hard to recall her youth that withered during it was stark reality, she strove desperately not to think about it. She didn't like to dwell in those lost years.

"Bran…Rickon…Robb…Arya…Jon…Father…Mother…" she whispered each name as she, careful of the thorns, clipped a white rose for each, placing them in the basket at her elbow.

Moving silently as the snow that flurried around her she turned at the end of the row to start up a second, these bushes bloomed with crimson blooms.

"Eddard…Anna…sweet Robb…little Cat…" she clipped red blooms which she added to her basket. A shudder moved over her shoulders as the placed the last one.

Looking up to the sky she strained to see the placement of the sun in the gray-white sky hoping to judge the time lest she tarry and freeze in the unforgiving cold. She was frightfully good at losing track of time as of late and while in years prior – years lived a hundred years ago she would have willingly, gladly surrendered her body to the snow, to the cold as means to bring herself back to something known. She was a daughter of the North, the cold was something she knew but she no longer, and hadn't for quite some time, felt that urge.

She surveyed her roses, her rows of hearty bushes that had been her sanctuary, which was now covered in the snow of the third winter they had had since the fateful winter in the middle of the War.

Winter made her think on things that she would rather not, winter made her feel things she would rather not…winter made her think and miss her father, it made her grieve her father harder. It made her miss her brothers, her sister…her mother. It made her heart hurt.

The last bushes she touched as she wound her way toward the front of her rose garden were the youngest; these ones weren't yet blooming and might not this winter as she just transplanted them from the hot house.

When she had thought about her future all those years ago she hadn't thought she would tend roses. Digging in dirt, getting cut and pricked, handling manure and hauling water, these were not chores that high-born ladies were usually raised to do, they were surely not tasks that a future Queen, as she had aspired to be all those years ago, would do.

_Well, perhaps at Highgarden, maybe they were there, _she sighed but shook the thought away. She wouldn't go so far as to say that she enjoyed the gardening but it was her escape and she had the desperate need to tend. From the day that she had set her eyes on the burnt scared ruins of Winterfell she found solace in the turning of the earth, in the tending of roses when she couldn't bear sounds of the rebuilding.

She hadn't the skills to build keep walls or the strength to lay brick, but she could tend the garden soil, she could leech her frustrations, her anger into the hoe as she tilled the ground. She could water it with her tears and feed it in the end with the scant hope and love she was fearful to invest elsewhere.

Every single bush that was in this garden she had grown had fostered from tiny seeds with her hard work, her tears…with pieces of heart and sanity.

The red and white were the oldest bushes in the garden, she remembers those first few months she coddled them, cared for them, looked after them after she had brought them him to this rocky, unforgiving piece of earth. She would have slept under the stars with them if she had been allowed. At the time she transplanted those bushes she had tied up her entirety in those bushes, she felt as if her life was tied to them in some way and that their survival was somehow tied to her own.

If they could survive, she could too. And they did.

She turned away from her courtyard roses then and entered the hot house at the start of the garden. Her latest project had been creating a hybrid rose, a crossbreed that was finally starting to show buds though no blooms.

This crossbreed was consuming her, she had created this, and it was the first of it's kind. These roses would be new. Years she had been researching it, reading book after book, consulting with maesters all over the realm for any advice they might have. Most told her to not bother trying, the breeds that she wanted to blend were opposed. _That's why I want to do it! The resiliency of the Winterfell winter rose and the beauty of Westerlands rose… _she remembered arguing passionately.

The day her seeds pushed through the soil into seedlings she wept. Her seedlings had thrived into apparently healthy bushes. The fiber of the stems was strong and supple, the roots were robust and running going deep, they would need to be both to survive here. The leaves and stems were a pearl white, they shimmered like snow, everyone that saw them were astonished by the white ivory.

She brushed some of the dirt off of the rough-hewn bench and sat across from her budding roses and reached out to touch the leaves hesitatingly. _Will you ever bloom?_

"They were never meant to grow in a place like this…"

"No, but then again neither were you my lady, but you've thrived…"

Sansa startled as a large shadow fell across her. She blinked not realizing she had spoken aloud.

"I am not a rose my lord," she answered. "I am thinking that I would like to transplant them outside tomorrow, plant them with the others. Things aren't meant to grow in captivity…" she kept her gaze on the plants.

"Sansa, a hot house is not a prison, it protects early starts from harsh elements that might destroy them otherwise…you know that."

Sansa had tears in her eyes but didn't know why. "I know…it's just…" she bit her lip to try and keep herself from letting her tears fall.

"You are having the nightmares again, about being trapped, about being a prisoner. You dream of Kings Landing…"

She looked at him then as he came closer to her "Yes…yes, I dream about being a caged bird but I wake up remembering the day you opened my cell…winter is coming, winter is here and I just can't help remembering…"

* * *

"Remembering that I took you to anther cell…" he sighed sitting next to her.

"No, no you didn't. I mean, I thought you had but I have never experienced truer freedom than with you. You didn't make a dove but you taught me to fly…"

Tyrion was surprised to find tears in his own eyes. They had been married nearly 22 years; of those they had spent 18 as true man and wife.

Year 1 she had told him she trusted him and they escaped King's Landing together under accusation that they had murdered Joffrey. They fought, schemed, survived while war raged.

Year 4 she told him that she loved him.

Year 5 Queen Daenerys won the war and Sansa bore him their first child, a beautiful, perfect boy they named after her father. The Queen offered him Hand, Tyrion begged to decline that he had to return his wife to her home, to find any signs of the family she had lost.

Year 6 Queen Daenerys named all the lands that had been his father's to him by rights and by the Crown and she honored the marriage deal that granted him Winterfell. They returned to Winterfell and rebuilt it to its glory.

Year 8 Sansa bore him a daughter whom they named after his mother Joanna, called Anna and she told him that with Winterfell restored she no longer wished to reside. Their son would have a keep to return when he was of age to rule but it wasn't her home any more. She asked to leave; she told him that while her roses were finally taking root he wasn't – he needed back doing what fulfilled him. He tried to convince her that she was what fulfilled him; she had shaken her head and left to prepare her roses for transport.

Year 9 Tyrion took place as Hand to the Queen and Sansa planted her first garden away from Winterfell. They did not live in the Tower of the Hand. He thrived and his lady wife's roses begun to root in their new soil.

Year 15 with two more children Tyrion and his family returned the home of his birth, to a home that was unforgiving as the North but for different reasons. Sansa's roses survived. Sansa survived.

Year 18 they were happy, they were whole…Sansa's roses bloomed.

Year 22 and Tyrion had finally heard the words the he had been unconsciously wishing to hear their entire marriage. She didn't resent him. She didn't love him out of duty. He had given her the choice for years to leave him, to have her freedom from their marriage without penalty. He loved her; he had loved her from the beginning, had desired her but never wanted to her to reciprocate out of duty like all those courtesy she had paid him in the beginning.

He knew she loved him, he never ceased to wonder how or why, scared and dishonorable as he was but she did. Somehow along the way she had come to love him and he woke every morning without fail, grateful that she did.

Part of him had apparently still worried she resented him and had only come to love him because she had to, because he was her only option, frankly put. Somewhere along the line he had accepted it though, accepted that she would never pick him, never chose him over her Knight of Flowers. She loved him, yes, he did believe that now after all these years…but for the first time right now, in her dirty hot house in the middle of winter he felt like she would actually chose him, pick him. She loved him, which had always been enough, until right this moment – right this moment he wanted to tell him completely and wholly that she would pick, always pick him.

From somewhere he managed to find the strength to voice the question that was consuming him. He had to know, gods be good, he had to know…the answer might kill him but he had to know.

"If you had been given the chance on our wedding day to marry Willas or go on and marry me…who would you have chosen?"

"Willas," she answered instantly.

Tyrion's gut clenched and his heart died in his chest.

"You silly man," Sansa must have read the disappointment on his face as she turned on the bench to look at him fully, "I've been married to you longer than I ever was not…I know what you're asking. If I was that girl again and given the choice between a Lannister and the majestic Willas which meant escape from King's Landing and a life in Highgarden and summer roses…of course I would pick Willas."

"I am not that girl any more and haven't been for quite some time. My lord husband, I wouldn't trade a moment of our life for anything. You could parade a thousand knights in front of me…I wouldn't see one of them."

She was trying to get him to look at her, he refused, he knew his face was an open book to her, it always had been. Their years together had just increased his transparency to her knew, he didn't want her to see the hurt he knew was there.

"Even if we didn't have our beautiful children…I know you were thinking that. Tyrion…I meant it, I've never felt the freedom I feel with you. Once you cracked through my armor I've never been able to hold back. In my father's house I was raised to be a lady, to be mindful of words and actions, to be courteous and obedient and those things became my shield as I became a captive. It's why Winterfell will never be my home again, I will always feel like a child there."

"You made me your wife, yes you were forced and so was I…but you made me your wife and treated me like it. You told me it was okay to speak my mind, to act…you made me remember my value and importance. Tyrion…you gave me my freedom and then taught me to fly…Now that I can the only home the only cage I will ever return to is yours and my love, it is no cage at all."

Tyrion finally look at her and she was smiling at him tears running down her cheeks. He believed her. Just as she could read him, he could read her and she was truth.

"Gods be good, I do love you…and I don't know what I'd do without you."

"You're never going to have to find out, I love you husband and I would and will pick you over any one at in time, you are my choice," she leaned forward for his kiss. He gave it readily.

The crossbred roses would not bloom that winter but Sansa had resigned herself to that, maybe she didn't need the roses to reaffirm her survival any more, maybe it was finally time to let the roses go, let the roses grow as they would, in their own time, just like love.

After all, these wouldn't be Winterfell roses, these would be Lannister roses grown with the steel and heart of a Stark…roses that would grow in winter in the large shadow of the Little Lion and his Lady Wolf.

* * *

**This was my first go attempting to write GOT, I know I mixed things from the books and the TV series and left plenty holes...I mostly just wanted to write Tyrion x Sansa and work on finding a tone...a voice for them. I hope you don't judge too harshly and hope you enjoyed! Thanks so much for reading!**


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